As of now, Google is the most valuable company on earth

Apple has officially been dethroned as the king of Wall Street — by the company it once declared "thermonuclear war" against.

Google overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization on Tuesday after a strong holiday quarter earnings report that drove its stock price up 5% overnight.

When the stock market opened on Tuesday, Google had a market value of $550.6 billion, beating out Apple's market cap of $529.1 billion for the first time in its history.

The rankings represent more than just a constantly fluctuating vanity leaderboard, though it is certainly that as well. It is the culmination of a slow sea change in thinking about which technology giant is best poised to grow in the second half of this decade and beyond.

The rivalry of old — Apple versus Microsoft — has since been replaced by Apple and Google, who began competing in earnest in 2008 when Google introduced Android to take on Apple's iPhone.

And, if you review the rankings and look far enough ahead, it may increasingly be replaced by Google verses Facebook.

Apple CEO Tim Cook does some soul searching.

Are Apple's glory days behind it?

For more than a decade, Apple was an unstoppable force in the tech world.

Under the leadership of its late CEO and founder Steve Jobs, the company unveiled in quick succession the iPhone and iPad, both of which became multibillion-dollar businesses.

Last month, however, Apple revealed that its overall sales will likely decline next quarter for the first time in 13 years as demand for the iPhone slows.

The iPad, meanwhile, has been gradually declining for many quarters. Suddenly, Apple's historic money-making machine seems to be slowing down.

But Wall Street values companies based on their future growth, not the road behind.

In that sense, Google has a better story, showing off its potential for growth.

Google, criticized in the past by Wall Street for overspending and under-disclosing its investments, brought on a new CFO and overhauled its entire structure. Instead of one big Google, the company became Alphabet with separate, autonomous divisions that should be able to innovate without struggling within the bureaucracy of a larger company.

Yet, several of these divisions may be poised to become Google's next billion-dollar business, just as the company succeeded in doing with its Android product line.

Google vs Facebook

Just hours before Google reported earnings, Facebook surged ahead of Exxon Mobil — which was also once the top dog on Wall Street — to fourth on the list of most valuable businesses.

The two businesses, both written off at various points by Wall Street, now share a similar narrative: fast-growing companies run by founder CEOs with steady, never-failing revenue growth and bold talk about finding the next big thing.

If Apple won by creating the devices that consumers want to spend all their time on, Google and Facebook are winning by building the applications that those consumers spend all their time with on those devices.

They may not have Apple's lush, carrier-subsidized profit margins, but they do have the attention of billions of users.

In short, they own the Internet. And they won't let investors forget it.

On Google's earnings call Tuesday night, CEO Sundar Pichai noted that Gmail now has more than one billion monthly active users, making it Google's seventh product to reach that milestone.

Less than five minutes later, Facebook announced that WhatsApp, its largest acquisition to date, had just topped one billion active users as well.

The message is clear: the new arms race in the technology world is the race to reach and then make money off of products with a billion users or more. (Sorry, Twitter.)

While Facebook and Google are profiting mightily off of the shift to smaller screened smartphones and tablets, the two companies are also racing to expand Internet usage around the world and build new platforms like virtual reality that may continue their dominance and keep them both high in the rankings for years to come.

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